Category: Conferences

I am so excited to be presenting at the 2018 Association for Asian American Studies conference: “Solidarity and Resistance: Toward Asian American Commitment to Fierce Alliances” (March 29-31).

Our panel, “Entangled Ecologies: Transpacific Alliances and Resistance in a More Than Human World” (Friday, March 30; 8:00AM – 9:30AM; Yorkshire) explores the contributions Asian American studies and Asian Americanist critique can offer to unfolding discourses on ecological crisis and the anthropocene. I am thrilled to be in conversation with a brilliant cast of thinkers, teachers, artists, and activists: Chad Shomura (University of Colorado Denver), Jess X. Snow (New York University Tisch School of Arts), and Heidi Hong(University of Southern California). Please join us tomorrow as we think together about aesthetics, culture, entanglement, resistance, survival, temporality, space, and super pigs.

You can find our full panel description and the abstract for my paper on Bong Joon Ho’s urgent and beautifully executed film Okja below. Hope to see you bright and early at our session!

Panel: Entangled Ecologies: Transpacific Alliances and Resistance in a More Than Human World

Session Abstract: In our contemporary moment, human-driven climate change continues to disproportionately affect working class communities of color, devastate animal and plant life, and threaten indigenous ways of life. This panel explores Asian American and Pacific Islander strategies of resistance against imperialism and militarization that also attends to our entanglements with nonhuman ecologies and organisms. It acknowledges that lands, oceans, and organisms not only witness colonial violence, but also produce vibrant materialities and connections in its aftermath. Our panel asks: What resistant strategies and tactics form alliances between seemingly disparate geographies, populations, and species? How can we develop alternative ways of being that recognize the knowledge, resilience, and resistance of landscapes, oceans, and non-human animals? In what ways can Asian American studies align itself with struggles against ecological destruction and dreams of sustainable futures?

This is a long long overdue post… Having the HASTAC and ASA conferences back-to-back weekends this year was more than a little chaotic, but it also meant that I had a chance to be part of a series of thoughtful, engaged conversations with people working on amazing and varied projects- on technology, critical university studies, feminist pedagogy, race and the digital humanities, and more. Even now, over a month after both conferences, I find myself returning to the threads of those conversations to think through how I might integrate the ideas and practices I learned from attending panels and speaking to other faculty and students into my scholarly work.

For the time being, this post will be about HASTAC 2017, not least because it was my first time attending and also the first time I’ve ever been to a conference that welcomed such a range of experimental panels. You would think because I’d been in bi-weekly virtual meetings with the local organizers in Orlando, Bruce Janz and Amy Giroux, for months in advance that I would have a better sense of what to anticipate, but I really didn’t… This just goes to show that for all of the things the digital enables, it cannot capture the feeling of what it means to be together in a shared space, in real-time.

I am feeling invigorated after HASTAC 2017: The Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities– my very first HASTAC conference (hopefully of many more to come). Everyone was so welcoming, even to someone who feels like an interloper in the DH world, and it was comforting to realize that a good number of people there also see themselves on the peripheries of this field. We had great conversations, both in person and on Twitter, about using technology to do social justice work, disciplinary anxieties, feminist pedagogy, and cultivating new communities on and offline. There is so much to reflect on, so stay tuned for a fuller (and more coherent) reflection.

But for now, I am hoping to take the energy from this conference to the upcoming American Studies Association conference, “Pedagogies of Dissent.” I am presenting on the panel, “Pedagogies of (Resistance to) Neoliberalism” (Thursday, Nov. 9, 12-1:45 PM, Hyatt Regency Chicago, McCormick, Third Floor West Tower), along with Derek DiMatteo, Funie Hsu, and Emily Raymundo. Krista Benson, Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at Grand Valley State University, will be chairing and offering comments on our work. I am looking forward to this exciting conversation and hope to see you there!

Organized and facilitated by Emily Esten, Melissa Meade, Danica Savonick, Whitney Sperrazza, and Heather Suzanne Woods this session will be interactive–not your regular conference panel–and depend heavily on audience engagement. We will work together to explore what a feminist classroom looks and feels like and discuss strategies that you can integrate into your everyday teaching practices. The goal is to crowd-source a range of methods and resources that will be made available to all educators committed to feminist and antiracist pedagogy. Needless to say, this panel speaks to the Futures Initiative and HASTAC‘s emphasis on higher education as a public good.